Originally the Hogarth Essays would have been published as individual volumes with cover illustrations by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell who was also a member of the Bloomsbury Group.  The essays have been rebound, sadly losing the original covers and dustjackets, but retaining the original front matter and title pages for each individual essay.  

The Essays include titles by significant twentieth-century writers, poets, artists, economists, and academics such as Roger Fry, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Bonamy Dobrée, and Willa Muir.  Many were involved with the Bloomsbury Group, and were part of the Modernist movement in the early 20th Century. Their essays provide an insight into important debates and arguments of the time, including about the nature of poetry and the form of the novel, as well as critical pieces on works by Emily Brontë, Henry James and John Dryden.  

The very first essay in the series is Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, published in 1924, and adapted from a speech Woolf delivered to the Cambridge Heretics Society – a group of students and intellectuals who challenged traditional authorities and prevailing religious dogmas. Her work responds to a critical essay by Arnold Bennett which argued that the new generation of novelists, including D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Lytton Strachey, failed to create ‘real’ characters in their work. Bennett was also a novelist and journalist, he was criticised by the Bloomsbury Group as being part of an older tradition that needed to be broken with.

Reference: 824.91 HOG, The Hogarth essays: b first series (1925), 20th Century Collection, Newcastle University Special Collections, GB 86.